Open Access to Cable Data Networks

Transcription

1 Introduction Open Access to Cable Data Networks Emy Tseng Sharon Eisner Gillett The networks that are generically referred to as cable today began their lives with a particular purpose: the distribution of television signals within a community. Given this history, cable networks have always operated under a regulatory regime separate from telephone networks. Telephone systems are regulated as common carriers: telephone network services must be made available to all potential customers in a non-discriminatory fashion. Cable networks, in contrast, are not subject to the requirements of common carriage: cable system operators are under no legal obligation to make their networks available to anyone who wants to use them to distribute content (for example, a new television channel), and have in fact historically exhibited a high degree of vertical integration between conduit (cable networks) and content (TV channels). As ever more cable systems gain the capability to connect their subscribers to the Internet, this reality has sparked an intense legal wrangling and debate over the issue that is referred to as open access. 1 Should cable systems with the capability to transmit data be required to allow any service provider to access customers through the cable network? Or is the current industry structure in which service providers can only gain direct access to a cable system if they succeed in negotiating an agreement with the cable operator a more appropriate way forward? Proponents of open access point to the benefits that accrue to consumers 2, such as low prices and rapid innovation, from the current high degree of competition among

2 Internet Service Providers (ISPs). 3 Common carriage is viewed as having directly contributed to this competitive intensity: because ISPs were able to use the public telephone network to provide Internet access to consumers, without asking permission of the phone companies, many did so. Therefore, the argument goes, the transition to broadband Internet access will be marked by a significant reduction in (if not the death of) the competitive intensity of the ISP industry. Consumers will prefer broadband, and broadband cable networks will provide access to only one ISP, unlike the many ISPs accessible through the telephone network (whether dialup or DSL). The darkest cloud looming on the horizon in this view of the future is the fear that a monopolistic ISP would use its market power to manipulate content availability, thereby prejudicing what people can see, hear and read on the Internet. Proponents of the status quo point to the chilling effect that common carriage would have on network investment. 4 Upgrading cable systems to provide broadband data transmission requires large investments. If network operators either cannot reap the benefits of these investments, or must share the returns with unaffiliated ISPs, they are less likely to make them. By this argument, the imposition of open access would slow or stop progress toward universal availability of broadband. Fence-sitters argue that although common carriage is a good idea in theory, imposing it on existing vertically-integrated cable networks is another matter entirely. 5 In this view, the argument is not about whether ISPs can sell services to cable customers (they re all connected through the Internet, after all), but at what price. Imposing open access, so this story goes, is really a way of imposing price regulation, and therefore

3 likely to cause more harm than simply letting market forces take their course even if some of the markets are not as competitive as one might like. Most of the debate about open access to date is hampered by the lack of a clear picture of how open access might actually be accomplished in practice. If, for example, there really were no reasonable technical way of achieving open access (as some in the cable industry have argued 6 ), then the theoretical arguments in favor of open access would be largely irrelevant. Similarly, how is one to evaluate the claim that regulation would do more harm than good without some idea of which aspects of the problem might require regulation? The aim of this chapter is to fill this gap. Rather than taking a stand on whether open access is right or wrong, we answer the questions of how it can be achieved, what costs it imposes on cable network operators, and what issues it raises for the relationships between cable network operators and the companies who want to provide services over their networks. What is Open Access? What exactly is meant by open access? Table 1 provides a non-exhaustive list of different forms of open access, depending on what layer of the networking protocol stack is to be opened to service providers other than the cable operator and its affiliated broadband ISP. 7

4 Layer Application Network and/or data link Physical Table 1: Open Access Alternatives Potential Methods Gateway (customer chooses portal) Tunneling; Routing based on source address Spectrum unbundling; Separate facilities A simplistic form of open access is provided at the application layer when customers are able to configure their Internet applications to use the service providers of their choice. For example, a customer on a broadband cable network may use Web-based that is provided by a company (such as Yahoo) that is unaffiliated with the cable ISP. Or she may configure an client to retrieve mail from an account with an ISP other than the cable operator s (for example, the ISP and address she used before having the option of subscribing to broadband). Similarly, she may configure her Web browser to visit AOL s member web site by default, so that it looks (almost) as if AOL is her ISP. Of course, in these last two examples, the customer must have an account with another ISP or with AOL, for which she pays separately. Paying twice is generally considered unacceptable, both to the consumer and to the second service provider. Furthermore, service providers prefer not to have the public Internet in between their facilities and their subscribers, because of the loss of control this currently involves over the quality of service, and correspondingly the potential for future services, delivered to the subscriber. This chapter does not consider application-level methods of providing open access any further.

5 Open access at the physical layer is similarly straightforward to understand, yet impractical to implement. The ultimate open access would be achieved if each ISP reached customers over its own facilities a nightmare scenario, however, for those poor municipal employees charged with keeping streets from being dug up once a day. Somewhat more realistic is the notion of spectrum (also called frequency) unbundling, in which separate channels of the cable network are set aside for each ISP delivering service over the network. Spectrum unbundling has the virtue of extreme simplicity each ISP has its own separate sandbox to play in, as it were but it cannot realistically be supported in the cable networks that currently exist, mainly because upstream spectrum is extremely scarce in these systems. Dividing this spectrum in fixed ways, such that spectrum is devoted to a particular ISP whether they are carrying any traffic at that moment or not, is impractically inefficient. However, spectrum unbundling should not be ruled out as a mechanism for future networks with more generous up and downstream spectrum allocations. In practice, most open access trials currently underway use mechanisms that operate at the network and/or data link layers. The most commonly used mechanisms are tunneling and source address-based routing, which we explain in detail below. These mechanisms operate almost completely transparently to users. They do, however, force users to take some kind of action to select their ISP, in contrast to current cable modem services in which the ISP choice is bundled into the service provided by the cable operator, and the user need not log in to use the network. The user s action may be as simple and static as a one-time sign-up, comparable to what DSL users currently do when they select which ISP s DSL service to purchase. Or it may be something more dynamic

6 such as a login screen, presented to users each time they reboot their PC, or whenever they wish to change service providers. 8 Open Access Cable Architecture Both tunneling and source address-based routing build on top of existing cable data networks, converting them from the closed (i.e. single, affiliated ISP) architecture pictured in Figure 1, to the open (i.e. multiple ISP) architecture pictured in Figure 2. City Hub Node City Hub Regional Head End ISP A TAP Node Internet Node HFC Drop City Hub Cable Modem Figure 1. Closed Access Cable Data Network Architecture City Hub ISP A Node City Hub Regional Head End ISP B TAP Node Internet Node Drop HFC ISP C Cable Modem City Hub Figure 2. Open Access Cable Data Network Architecture

7 Both the closed and open architectures have in common the network elements on the left side of Figures 1 and 2, from the cable subscriber to the regional head end. Because this portion of the network is under the control of the cable operator, we refer to it as the cable data network. It includes cable modems connected to PCs in subscribers homes; coaxial cable connecting modems to neighborhood nodes; and fiber optic cables connecting neighborhood nodes to city hubs and city hubs to each other and the regional head end. 9 To get a sense of the scale of such networks, consider that a neighborhood node typically serves 500-1,000 homes, of whom might subscribe to cable modem service; a city hub (also known as a local head end) serves anywhere from 20, ,000 homes; 10 and a regional head end serves anywhere from 150,000 to 1,000,000 homes. 11 The cable data network may be either bridged or routed, a choice that affects the implementation of open access (explained in more detail below). In a bridged network, equipment called bridges in the city hubs connect different network segments together into one single logical network, sharing all packets among the different network segments. Because this scheme does not scale very well, most cable data networks today are use routers instead of bridges. The cable data network is divided into sub-networks, and the routers deliver traffic only where it needs to go, conserving bandwidth. Most cable data networks are routed networks. City hubs contain cable modem termination systems (CMTS) that provide, in effect, the other end of the connection that begins with the modem in the subscriber s home. Unlike DSL and dial-up modem connections, the CMTS creates a shared Ethernet-style local area network, rather than a dedicated, point-to-point link. Open

8 access could be implemented by allowing multiple ISPs to access each CMTS. In practice, however, the point of multiple access is usually positioned at the regional head end, as shown in Figure 2. This approach is consistent with the interconnection of the closed access ISP to the cable data networks at the regional head end (Figure 1), and therefore a simpler extension of existing practice. Equally important, it is a more costeffective approach, because the regional head end serves so many more users than each CMTS. The open access architecture pictured in Figure 2 only works if the cable data network knows how to route traffic properly to and from subscribers of multiple ISPs. This requirement creates numerous challenges. For example, traffic coming from subscribers must be routed to their selected ISP s network. Normally, traffic is routed based on the shortest path to its final destination. Open access therefore requires something other than the destination address to indicate that the designated ISP s network should be part of the path. Traffic traveling toward subscribers may also pose a problem, since the subscriber s Internet Protocol address may appear foreign to the cable data network. Source address based routing (source routing, for short) and tunneling are two technical approaches to dealing with these issues. Source routing works by making subscribers part of the cable data network in other words, assigning the subscriber s Internet Protocol (IP) address from the pool associated with the cable data network and modifying the routers within that network to treat these subscribers specially. Tunneling, in contrast, uses the ISP s address pool to identify subscribers, and hides the resulting

9 foreign address from the cable data network. The following sections explain these two approaches in more detail. Source Address Based Routing Ordinarily, traffic is routed based on the shortest path to a destination address. Policy routing is a mechanism for routing packets based on criteria other than the shortest path, such as source address, data type, current network traffic level, traffic type (e.g. interactive versus batch), etc. 12 Many commercial router products currently support policy routing. Network operators usually use these policies to manage network traffic and quality of service. With source routing, a policy is used to route traffic based on the source address of the data packet in addition to the destination address. In order to implement source routing, all of the cable data network s routers need to be capable of policy routing. In an open access implementation, source routing uses the source IP address of the subscriber s data packets to route traffic to a specific ISP. Each subscriber s IP address is associated with the subscriber s chosen ISP. The cable data network routers routing tables are updated with an entry associating the subscriber s IP address with a path to the designated ISP s network. The routers then use the IP address to route traffic from the subscriber through to their ISP. The cable data network assigns and administers the IP addresses for subscribers on behalf of all the ISPs. 13 The cable data network s address space is divided into different pools, each pool dedicated to a specific ISP. The subscriber s PC gets assigned an IP address from the pool of IP addresses associated with the chosen ISP. Since the

10 subscriber s IP address is part of the cable network s address space, traffic bound to the subscriber is handled normally. The cost to implement open access using source routing depends on the number of routers that need to be upgraded to support policy routing. This number varies widely based on the existing configuration of a cable data network. The cost could be nothing if all the routers support policy routing, or the cost of an upgrade (software and/or hardware) to existing routers. Tunneling Technology Figure 3 illustrates how tunneling is used for open access. Conceptually, each ISP operates a router at the regional head end that directs traffic between the rest of the ISP s network (including the rest of the Internet) and the cable data network subscribers who have selected that ISP. Traffic travels between the subscriber and her selected ISP inside of a so-called tunnel technology that wraps the traffic with address information local to the cable data network, so that the ISP s foreign address information is hidden while the traffic is in transit through the cable data network..

11 ISP A Regional Head End City Hub ISP B Node Internet ISP C L2TP or PPPoE tunnel PPP Session Figure 3: Tunneling Architecture In practice, a separate physical router for each ISP is not needed at the regional head end. Instead, a device known as an access concentrator can be installed by the cable operator. Access concentrators can be thought of as uber routers in that they support the functions of multiple physical routers within a single piece of equipment. 14 They also implement the technology needed to support tunneling. Multiple commercial access concentrators are currently available. 15 These devices have been more commonly used in DSL deployments than in cable data networks. Because DSL networks have been required from the outset to support multiple ISPs, the ability of access concentrators to support multiple virtual routers has been more essential to DSL deployments. However, the technology is applicable to both kinds of networks, and some access concentrators have the capability to handle DSL, cable modem and dialup Internet access traffic within a single system.

12 Access concentrators support a range of functions and features, many of which are driven by requirements other than open access. One such requirement is subscriber management: the ability to track which services each subscriber has signed up for, measure usage and other information needed for billing, automate service plan changes, etc. Another popular driver is Virtual Private Networking (VPN), i.e. supporting the ability of subscribers to connect through the public Internet to a corporate intranet in a secure fashion, as if they were connecting from within the intranet. Tunneling is used to support VPN, and as a result can also be applied to the open access problem. A tunnel is created by client software on the subscriber s PC when it establishes a Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) session, or virtual dedicated connection, between the subscriber and the specified ISP. To the subscriber, tunneling looks much like dialup (absent the noisy modem tones and the long waits), because PPP is the same protocol used to establish connections to the Internet over dialup access links. 16 PPP sessions are supported by one of two lower-level tunneling protocols, depending on whether the cable data network is bridged or routed. If it is bridged, then PPP over Ethernet (PPPoE) is used to enable PPP to traverse a Layer 3/Ethernet network. 17 PPPoE encapsulates PPP frames within a PPPoE packet that contains an Ethernet header. Since PPPoE is a layer 2 protocol, the subscriber PC is known only by the MAC (i.e. layer 2) address within the cable network. Outside the cable network, the PC is known by the global IP address. The ISP assigns the global IP address for the subscriber PC. If the cable data network is routed, then the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol (L2TP) is used to provide a dedicated connection (a L2TP tunnel) over which the PPP session is

13 established. 18 L2TP encapsulates an IP packet within another IP packet, implementing a double IP layer. When L2TP is used, the subscriber PC is assigned two IP addresses: one that is locally valid and used within the cable data network, and another that is globally valid and used when packets traverse the rest of the Internet. With L2TP tunneling, it is also possible to establish a tunnel directly between a subscriber s PC and a server at the selected ISP. In this architecture, no access concentrator is needed at the regional head end, at least for the purpose of supporting open access. 19 Cable data network operators are less likely to prefer this architecture, however, because of the lack of visibility it gives them into the traffic carried on their network. 20 Cost The cost to implement open access using tunneling depends on a number of factors, including whether the cable data network is bridged (i.e. uses PPPoE) or routed (i.e. uses L2TP) and how many tunnels need to be open simultaneously. This section explains a simple model that was constructed to get a sense of the capital cost per cable modem subscriber that must be incurred by the cable operator to support tunnel-based open access. This model only considers the incremental capital costs of upgrading an existing cable data network to support open access. Cable infrastructure upgrades, such as the installation of a hybrid fiber-coax network and two-way capability, are assumed to have already been made by the cable operator and are therefore outside the scope of the model. The cost of physical connectivity from ISPs networks to the regional head end is also excluded from the model because it is assumed to be the responsibility of the ISPs. 21

14 Client Software Access Concentrator Regional Head End ISP A City Hub ISP B Node Internet ISP C L2TP or PPPoE tunnel PPP Session Figure 4: Equipment needed for tunneling As Figure 4 illustrates, tunneling requires the cable operator to install one or more access concentrators in the regional head end as well as client tunneling software on subscriber PCs. The incremental capital cost of open access therefore consists of the cost per subscriber of these two elements. Client Tunneling Software Cost PPPoE and L2TP client software is available from several vendors. 22 If the subscriber were to purchase this software herself, it would cost on the order of $20-40 per license. 23 In that case, there would be no cost to the cable operator. However, a more likely scenario is that the cable opeator buys licenses and provides the client software to subscribers. In that scenario, client software licenses can be purchased in bulk at $1 per subscriber. 24 The model therefore uses $1 for this cost.

15 Access Concentrator Equipment Cost The cost of an access concentrator depends on how many simultaneous client connections it supports. Because tunneling adds virtual connections to what would otherwise be a connectionless architecture, it introduces a cost element to cable data networks that scales with the number of simultaneous users, not just the amount of traffic they send. Tunneling, in other words, makes the economics of cable modem networks a little more like DSL networks. The number of client connections supported by access concentrators varies depending on the vendor and model. A cable data network operator s total costs for access concentrators will depend on detailed purchase patterns over time whether they choose to overprovision the network up front, or make incremental upgrades to the network as they add subscribers. To simplify the analysis, the model represents access concentrator equipment costs in terms of the average cost per client connection. This average cost ranges from $20-$70 per L2TP connection and $2.00-$8.75 per PPPoE connection. 25 The variation arises from economies of scale (the more connections are supported, the less each one costs). Because these ranges are not very large, the model simplifies the analysis even further by taking the midpoint of observed data points within these ranges, resulting in average costs of $45 per L2TP client connection and $6 per PPPoE client connection. 26 These prices reflect volume discounts to the cable operator of twenty to thirty percent. Because not all subscribers will necessarily be connected simultaneously, computing the cost of the access concentrator per subscriber requires scaling the cost per client connection down by the fraction of subscribers connected at any given moment.

16 The model uses a relatively large default value of eighty percent for this percent of client connections online parameter, with sensitivity tested in the range from percent. 27 Intuitively, the high default value is justified by two assumptions: Many subscribers will simply leave their connections open whenever their PCs are on, whether or not they are actively using the network, because of the always on nature of the cable data network (and the lack of any financial penalty for remaining connected); and With the increasing adoption of home networks, more home PCs will remain on all the time, and therefore always connected. Table 2: Cost of Tunneling Tunneling Method Incremental Capital Cost per Subscriber L2TP (Routed networks) $37 PPPoE (Bridged networks) $6 Scaling the access concentrator cost to a per-subscriber figure and adding the cost of the client software results in the total per-subscriber costs shown in Table 2. As this table illustrates, the resulting incremental costs per subscriber are quite modest. Even assuming all connections are left online all the time, as illustrated by the sensitivity analysis shown in Figure 5, the maximum cost per subscriber is only $46.

17 $50.00 $45.00 L2TP $40.00 PPPoE Cost Per Subscriber $35.00 $30.00 $25.00 $20.00 $15.00 $10.00 $5.00 $0.00 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Percent Connections Online Figure 5. Sensitivity Analysis on Percent of Connections Online Recall that these are capital costs, i.e. they are incurred once per subscriber, not once per month or year. At less than $50 per subscriber, open access is unlikely to impose a significant financial burden on a cable data network operator. This result suggests either that open access is financially trivial to implement, or that the costs it imposes are not adequately captured in capital terms. In other words, the real costs of open access may not lie in equipment purchases, but in the changes it requires to ongoing operations. Conclusions Open access to cable, meaning the sharing of one physical cable data network by multiple Internet service providers, is technically feasible and can be implemented in several different ways. The most promising approach is to interconnect the different ISPs to the cable data network at the regional head end, and support this configuration with

18 commercially available technologies such as source routing or tunneling (PPP plus PPPoE or L2TP). The incremental capital costs of implementing open access in this way are quite modest. Tunneling, for example, incurs a one-time cost of only $46 per cable modem subscriber under the model s most conservative assumptions. Under a different (but still reasonable) set of assumptions, namely, that cable data network operators are installing policy routers and/or access concentrators anyway for other reasons, open access incurs essentially zero incremental capital cost. This finding does not mean that open access is trivial and imposes no costs on cable data networks. Rather, it means that the issues and costs involved in supporting open access arise from sources other than equipment purchases. Although the following discussion identifies operational costs associated with open access, 28 quantifying such costs remains an area for further research. Coordination of IP address management is one source of operational costs. Cable data network operators must already coordinate with their affiliated ISPs to manage the assignment of IP addresses to subscribers. Open access intensifies both the magnitude and the nature of this problem: cable operators need to coordinate with more ISPs, and the relationships are likely to be less cooperative because these ISPs will not be organizational affiliates. Similarly, open access requires the cable data network operator to share aspects of customer care and network management with non-affiliated ISPs. When new subscribers are added, or existing ones experience problems or make changes to their service, information must be properly communicated among several unaffiliated companies. If

19 subscribers are not to be driven to distraction (or to the competition, where it exists) by finger pointing and long waits to resolve service problems, cable data network operators and the multiple, unaffiliated ISPs who interconnect with them will have to develop effective procedures for joint resolution of problems. Development of the necessary coordination processes, and the human relationships that support them, will take time and impose operational costs on all of the companies involved. Because open access is a form of interconnection among IP networks, issues that have proved troublesome in the context of Internet interconnection will crop up in the open access context as well. These issues include how one network can guarantee and/or differentiate service quality to another (the so-called Quality of Service, or QoS, problem), and the direction and magnitude of payment flows among interconnecting networks. QoS problems arise because the interconnecting ISPs share the resources of the cable data network. The cable operator must ensure that one ISP s users do not hog all the cable bandwidth, crowding out the users of other ISPs. Ensuring fairness will be especially important when the cable data network operates an affiliated ISP, because there will be a natural tendency for unaffiliated ISPs to suspect (if not claim to a judge) that the affiliated ISP receives preferred service at their expense. Any scheme for fair resource allocation in the cable data network will have to be complemented by monitoring tools accessible to all of the parties. It will also have to be rich enough to support evolving Internet applications with different network service requirements, such as telephony, streaming video, or videoconferencing.

20 Although many technologies have been developed to differentiate and guarantee service quality (for example, diffserv and intserv), meaningful open access requires not just the existence of these technologies but also their cooperative adoption across network and organizational boundaries. Without transparent mechanisms that will enable ISPs and cable data network operators to write, monitor, and enforce performance contracts, open access is more likely to produce lawsuits than satisfied customers and industry partners. As a form of interconnection, open access also raises questions about the direction and magnitude of payment flows between ISPs and cable data network operators. Disagreements over this issue have derailed several industry attempts to achieve open access through negotiation among the parties instead of regulatory fiat. ISPs see themselves as providing the services that make the Internet worth using in the first place. Cable operators see themselves as having invested to provide the fat pipe that makes the experience pleasant. Naturally, each party believes that its role is the more essential and therefore that it should own the relationship with the subscriber and receive the larger cut of her payment. If the negotiating parties had similar levels of market power, these differences in perspective would undoubtedly have been reconciled long ago. The persistence of the open access policy debate is not surprising when one considers that most cable data network operators enjoy a monopoly position in their local market, while most ISPs face intense competition. Market-based agreements are more likely to arise in areas where the playing field is more level, i.e. communities where facilities-based broadband competition is emerging. 29 Of course, these are the same communities in which open

Wholesale IP Bitstream on a Cable HFC infrastructure In order to understand the issues related to an ISP reselling Cable Based Internet access it is necessary to look at similarities and dissimilarities

ADSL or Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line Backbone Bandwidth Bit Commonly called DSL. Technology and equipment that allow high-speed communication across standard copper telephone wires. This can include

ADSL vs Cable Cable subscribers are connected directly to high speed lines while ADSL subscribers are connected directly to medium speed lines Cable subscribers share the line connecting them to neighbourhood

White Paper Wideband: Delivering the Connected Life Subscribers are increasingly demanding many services to many screens. They want the convenience of having services available anytime, anywhere, and on

Testimony of Mr. Garry Betty April 23, 2002 Introduction Good afternoon and thank you for inviting me to testify today about the proposed merger between AT&T and Comcast and its potential impact on competition

Traditional PBX & Hosted VOIP Technology: The Key Differences & What They Mean For Your Business CONTENTS Summary... 3 What s The Buzz About?... 3 What It Means For Businesses... 3 What It Means For Employees...

Will MPEG Video Kill Your Network? The thought that more bandwidth will cure network ills is an illusion like the thought that more money will ensure human happiness. Certainly more is better. But when

Chapter 4 Connecting to the Internet through an ISP 1. According to Cisco what two things are essential to gaining access to the internet? a. ISPs are essential to gaining access to the Internet. b. No

3.1 TELECOMMUNICATIONS, NETWORKS AND THE INTERNET The Business Value of Telecommunications and Networking Business value impacts of the telecommunications and Networking are: Declining transaction costs

Glossary of Telco Terms Access Generally refers to the connection between your business and the public phone network, or between your business and another dedicated location. A large portion of your business

Computer Networks A group of two or more computer systems linked together. There are many [types] of computer networks: Peer To Peer (workgroups) The computers are connected by a network, however, there

White Paper Voice over IP is Transforming Business Communications Voice over IP (VoIP) is changing the world of telecommunications. It entails the transmission of voice calls over data networks that support

A Look into the Cloud An Allstream White Paper 1 Table of contents Why is everybody talking about the cloud? 1 Trends driving the move to the cloud 1 What actually is the cloud? 2 Private and public clouds

Appendix A: Basic network architecture TELECOMMUNICATIONS LOCAL ACCESS NETWORKS Traditionally, telecommunications networks are classified as either fixed or mobile, based on the degree of mobility afforded

WAN Data Link Protocols In addition to Physical layer devices, WANs require Data Link layer protocols to establish the link across the communication line from the sending to the receiving device. 1 Data

Chapter 1 Review Questions R1. What is the difference between a host and an end system? List several different types of end systems. Is a Web server an end system? 1. There is no difference. Throughout

How to Share an Internet Connection Adapted from Chapter 5 of The Little Network Book, by Lon Poole and John Rizzo, illustrations by John Grimes This article is provided courtesy of Peachpit Press. ONE

Voice Over IP is it hype or can it work for me? By American Business Communication Inc. In the world of telecom, it seems like everywhere you turn there is a buzz about Voice over IP (VoIP). Hardly a day

Bandwidth Aggregation, Teaming and Bonding The increased use of Internet sharing combined with graphically rich web sites and multimedia applications have created a virtually insatiable demand for Internet

The new market situation The impact of the Internet and web driving data growth more rapid than what the telcos predicted New data-oriented network technologies cheaper than SONET Optical networks Gigabit

Study Questions Using MIS 3e Chapter 6A Appendix How the Internet Works David Kroenke Q1: How does email travel? Q2: What is a communications protocol? Q3: What are the functions of the five TCP/IP-OSI

Networks 2 Gabriela Ochoa Lecture Networks 2/Slide 1 Content How is Internet connected? Internet backbone Internet service providers (ISP) How to connect a home computer to the Internet? How do networks

Cable Modems Definition Cable modems are devices that allow high-speed access to the Internet via a cable television network. While similar in some respects to a traditional analog modem, a cable modem

VoIP and the SMBs - Tapping the Market By Matt Delpercio Despite the benefits of IP telephony, only a small percentage of small to medium businesses (SMBs) use VoIP as their primary means of voice communications.

Page 1 of 8 Computer Networking Networks 9.1 Local area network A local area network (LAN) is a network that connects computers and devices in a limited geographical area such as a home, school, office

How do SMB benefit from using the Small but Secured Aries Server Appliance white paper Internet Needs The Internet revolution is like nothing in the history of mankind. E-mail can be sent from San Francisco

Guideline for setting up a functional VPN Why do I want a VPN? VPN by definition creates a private, trusted network across an untrusted medium. It allows you to connect offices and people from around the

US Data Services 2014-2019 Executive Summary CMR Market Research April 2015 Reproduction without permission 1 The contents of this report represent CMR s analysis of the information available to the public

In this chapter Sharing an Internet Connection Issues and Opportunities Different Ways to Share Sharing Your Internet Connection with Others: Creating Your Own Public Wi-Fi Hot Spot 7 Setting Up And Sharing

Charter Business : White paper SIP Trunking: A new voice in communications service WHITE PAPER With the rise of next-generation technology, business customers have more options than ever from providers

Fiber to the Home Definition Fiber to the home (FTTH) is the ideal fiber-optics architecture. In this architecture, fiber deployment is carried all the way to the customer s home (premises). Overview Today

Abstract Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are today becoming the most universal method for remote access. They enable Service Provider to take advantage of the power of the Internet by providing a private

Damery S.A. DAMERY S.A. is an international technology company serving cable operators, ISP, hospitality and commercial markets in more than 30 countries. Headquartered in Charleroi in Belgium, the company

US Business Services 2015 Executive Summary CMR Market Research May 2015 Reproduction without permission 1 The contents of this report represent CMR s analysis of the information available to the public

New York University, Leonard N. Stern School of Business C20.0001 Information Systems for Managers Fall 1999 Networking Fundamentals A network comprises two or more computers that have been connected in

Local Area Networks (LANs) The CCNT Local Area Networks (LANs) Course April 2012 release blueprint lists the following information. Courseware Availability Date identifies the availability date for the

Table of Contents Domain 3.0 Networking... 1 DOMAIN 3.0 NETWORKING 1. You are installing a cable modem in a client s home. How should you select where to put the cable modem? A. Placing the modem right

A Path to Ubiquitous, Any-to-Any Video Communication January 2015 Any Vendor. Any Network. Any Device. Introduction Over the last several years, great strides have been made to improve video communication

To ensure the functioning of the site, we use cookies. We share information about your activities on the site with our partners and Google partners: social networks and companies engaged in advertising and web analytics. For more information, see the Privacy Policy and Google Privacy &amp Terms.
Your consent to our cookies if you continue to use this website.